To Be Made Whole.

My weight fluctuates a lot— I’d say I gain and lose between 20 and 30 lbs. every year. I think there is a story my body is trying to tell. I think perhaps my body is storing too much pain at times.

The things that weigh on me:

The time I wanted back in with my foster family— so I met my foster parents at their job at the ad agency and gave them a presentation on why they should let me come back. The presentation was complete with ways I would financially contribute to the household, and ways that I would be good, and how no one would hardly notice me.

I only ever hit my mother once. It was a reflex. She was in a wild angered frenzy and threw a T-shirt at me. It had my favorite Superman button on it. A metal button the size of a cheeseburger. Somehow the weight of it landed on my nose and I bled. The shock of it all— my crying the blood, she ran to me, full of remorse. The second she was close I socked her in the stomach. Her face, the face she showed me, is the one that haunts me. My face and her face are so similar that the punishment is simple, it’s the look I give myself when I think no one likes me or that I’ve done wrong.

I danced naked for a very brief period in the late nineties. I did this despite the fact that I hated my body. The only way I could do this was drunk. Only I could never truly get wasted pouring small bottles of liquor into my soda for eight hours a day. There was a wild drug addict that went by the name Rain and sometimes she would feel sexy and pull me up on stage for a girl on girl show. I went down on her in front of strangers for no money at all. This does not look sexy. It looks like giving away your secrets. Even worse it looks like opening up a woman in front of other people and beating at her most vulnerable parts. Sometimes the DJ would walk into the dressing room and holler, “It smells like sick pussy in here.” I always thought it was me that smelled that way. My thighs were perpetually raw and rashed and red from rubbing together. I never think anything about my genitalia is right.

The time I was on the girl’s basketball team with a friend I’d had since Before Fostercare. I invited the team to come swim in our pool after practice. We were delirious with the luxury of jumping into a pool after being sweaty. I was swollen with the guilt of a class traitor showing them my new room with a waterbed and it’s own bathroom. My new house with the dog and the pool and a housekeeper. The housekeeper told everyone to leave. My foster brother told her it was because she was being racist. The team looked at me like the clock struck midnight and I’d turned into a pumpkin. My friend from Before was more empathic it was clear how naked I was in my borrowed existence.

When my mother got accepted to UCLA and we were so delighted by the prospects and I helped her dream and plan and pack the whole while thinking I was going with her but in the end she drove off without me. In fact there have been a half dozen times that I thought I was going somewhere that I wasn’t and it feels like the death of me every time. Including when my foster mother won her custody agreement and it turned out that winning didn’t include the matter of me.

Then there was the time I worked with one of my closest friends and she called me into her office on a Friday afternoon with a final check in hand.

There’s my mom’s mental state coupled with her religious zeal. She won’t ever seek treatment because of her faith. Then she confesses that she was crazy because of her menstrual cycle. That she prayed for it to go away and it did. (This is called menopause.)

But the real pain is in the constant reconciliation between my idea of what I wish my mother to be (capable) and what she is (incapable). This comes on a quarterly cycle as she calls me to tell me when she’s lost one job or another. How everyone is wrong. How the woman she was living with accused her of stealing or looked at her funny. She’ll then invite me on a cruise ship somewhere.

I think the most obvious thing about me is that the real ebb and flow of the weight occurs because of the original wound—that as naturally as I’d come into the lives of my parents— I was later dejected and taken out of it. Then again with foster parents. Then again. And once again. I worry every day that nobody wants me. If I were thinner maybe they would. If I didn’t give a shit maybe I would be happier. And so it goes.

Then I hear of a couple-Jennifer Cramblett and her partner Amanda Zinkon. A couple of women that took a stand in their small homogenous community in Uniontown Ohio to declare their love for one another. To live as domestic partners and then like many people— grow their family. They had love to share. They had room to grow. As a lesbian with a partner and a house that I rent that has a spare room/office I get this. Sometimes I tuck my fifty pound pit bull into bed, I literally wrap a comforter around her hind legs and lean in and for an instant as I close my eyes and kiss her forehead I flashback on a younger me, in a strange bed in a strange home and I’m stung again with the disparity of my adult life and my youth and think for certain that I am selfish in all sorts of ways that I shouldn’t be. Also I know I have a lot of nurturing to give. In my twenties my whole body warmed electric when I allowed myself to have a small cat and she fell asleep kneading my belly and purring with a loud motor every night. I’m not at all saying any of this even equates to having a child but the inclination is there, it lives in me.

On August 21, 2012, Jennifer Cramblett pushed and screamed and breathed, her daughter Payton into the world. After the sweating, after the pushing, and the umbilical chord business, and the washing up, the fact was revealed, little Payton is bi-racial. All the hubbub claims that the couple responded with love. That there is a bond there. Jennifer Cramblett makes clear in her statements, “I want to keep her.” But they’re suing. They are suing because they say they got the wrong sperm. They make all the claims of how difficult life is for a person of color in a predominantly white community. In fact Cramblett’s whole premise to her suit is to foresee the damages that Payton can incur due to the stigma of being bi-racial.

Yet the premise of any lawsuit is that some damage has occurred to the plaintiff and the rewards they are seeking will be an attempt at making them whole. I wish everything good for Payton, and yet I can’t help but ache for the day she will one day become aware that her parents sued the company that helped bring her into the world because she turned out different than expected. And rather than see that as miraculous or magical— a stigma was born. And when I read the story it scrapes and wreaks of the original wound, “No body wants you.”

What I’m hearing in Cramblett’s lawsuit is what I hear in my own shaming when I recount The Things That Hurt. I hear one woman’s plan for her life, a plan that is crafted by a lot of willfulness and determination. Unfortunately when I’m in my will I turn deaf to love. Love is in acceptance of the thing. There are these moments in our lives when the truth is revealed and we don’t just decide to move forward, we take hold of the truth, we embrace it. I learned the most about love and acceptance from grieving mothers. For example, my future sister in-law carried her son Lucas for nine months and then delivered him stillborn on Christmas day. Afterwards she held him, she touched his smooth pink cheek, and her heart must have filled with the richness of the love she and my brother shared, remembering the tender secret joys that created this small boy. And they knew there was a likelihood of Lucas having some affliction, and she chose to have her son and love him fiercely, not despite this, but because this is what mothers do. This is where true love lives. To forge ahead through life with the capacity to anticipate both happiness and sorrow—this is acceptance. Acceptance makes me whole.

Melissa Chadburn is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, SLAKE, Salon, The Rumpus and a dozen other places. She’s currently writing “A Tiny Upward Shove,” her teenage foster care narrative. Reach her at fictiongrrrl@gmail.com or follow her on twitter @melissachadburn. She loves your whole outfit right now.

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Join Jen Pastiloff, the founder of The Manifest-Station, in The Berkshires of Western Massachusetts in Feb of 2016 for a weekend on being human. It involves writing and some yoga. In a word: it’s magical.

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Jennifer Pastiloff, Beauty Hunter, is a writer and yoga teacher living with her husband in Los Angeles and soon to be son, when she’s not on an airplane. She travels the world with her Manifestation Retreats/Workshops On Being Human- a hybrid of yoga, writing, sharing out loud, and occasionally a dance party, as well as a workshop for young women called "Girl Power: You Are Enough."
It's an experience that has been described as NOT "woo-woo,", heart-mending and sometimes messy- just like life. You do not have to be a good yogi, or writer. Just a human being with a body. Jen has been featured on Good Morning America, New York Magazine, CBS News and more for her unique style of teaching. She studied poetry and writing at NYU and Bucknell University and is currently finishing her first book and is represented by Adriann Ranta at Foundry Media. She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff.

5 Comments

Thank you for sharing this story. I was born in 1948 when abortions were not allowed so I was a result of a forced marriage and a mother who never loved or touched me. I was told I was hated and that no one would ever love me. That stigma stungs and to this day it still makes its marks at times.

This is so hard, but so beautiful. It is sad to think how many people (women) will relate to this piece; the feeling of being unwanted… the feeling of being rejected over and over again. Obviously that speaks to a person on such a deep level. And how all you want is to feel accepted because acceptance DOES make you whole… or at least that is what we think at the time…
And the things we will do for acceptance. We’re all so broken and glued back together with cheap dollar store glue, broken again, cracked… we will do anything to make ourselves feel whole again until we realize that the reason we keep breaking is because we keep striving to be whole… instead of just acknowledging that we are broken and not perfect and owning that instead. And sometimes we feel strong and whole and together and then that rejection strikes again and it is like the world comes crashing down around us.
Ah. Life. Big, fat, gigantic stinkin’ beautiful mess. And love is the same thing.

Thank you for sharing that story because it’s nice to know is that the way I feel isn’t completely unheard of!!! I feel that only an unwanted because I am the black sheep of the family too totally stained the family name by becoming addicted to heroin and cocaine, which I have been clean and in recovery from, for several years. I feel as though I’m unwanted by my family and lifelong friends who I no longer have contact with because of the shame and so I’m basically passed around and someone is pretty much paid to keep me at bay from my family because they don’t want to deal with my problems!!! Why can’t they understand that I am Not only a product of genetics but also of my environment and there were choices that were made for me before I was even born -which I had no control over, but still have to deal with on a daily basis!!! I am currently living over 600 miles away from everyone I’ve ever known – including my biological family, but I’m still clean and in recovery and pretty much doing the best I’ve ever been doing for the longest time which makes me even more unwanted because I do not fit my designated role in my biological family as “the problem” or “the black sheep” – – so now I am even more unwanted than ever!!! Is the only time that I have ever been welcomed or even allowed to live in the house that I grew up in and be an active member of my biological family is when I’m at my worst because then I fit my designated role, but I can’t do that because that’s not the person that I truly am and going back to being that person will end my life!!!
Wow! I didn’t mean for my comment to be so long – but I really felt I could relate on a much deeper level than I ever have before after rereading this article – so again thank you very much!!! 🙂

About Jen Pastiloff

People Magazine says: Jennifer is changing women's lives through her empowerment workshops.
Cheryl Strayed says: Jennifer Pastiloff is a conduit of awakenings.
Lidia Yuknavitch says: Dear Jen, From you I have learned to alchemize fear with love, to redistribute love through compassion, to enter a room with others.
Jen leads her signature Manifestation Workshop: On Being Human all over the world & online. Information about events and workshops can be found at JenniferPastiloff.com. Her memoir was published by Dutton Books in 2019.
When she is not traveling she is based in Los Angeles with her husband and son and a cup of coffee. Follow Jen on instagram at @jenpastiloff or Facebook at Jennifer Pastiloff. She is also the creator of @nobullshitmotherhood and @gPowerYouAreEnough on instagram. Her motto to live by is Don’t Be An Asshole. She evens owns the URL.

About Angela M Giles

Angela M Giles is an editor and fellow badass at The Manifest-Station. Angela prides herself on being exactly who she is: An accidental warrior working to make grace and kindness sexy again. She has had her work appear online at The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Mothers, Medium: Human Parts as well as other journals. She has been featured in print at The Healing Muse and is a contributor to Shades of Blue, an anthology on depression and suicide from Seal Press. Angela tweets and is on Instagram as @angela.m.giles, and when inspired updates her blog, Air Hunger (http://airhunger.net). Angela lives in Massachusetts where she conquers the world, one day at a time.

About Francesca Grossman

Francesca Louise Grossman is a writer and writing instructor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, The Manifest Station, Ed Week, Drunken Boat, Word Riot, and The Huffington Post among others. She runs writing retreats and workshops internationally, and leads an annual intensive workshop at The Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has a BA and MA from Stanford University and a Doctorate from Harvard University in Education. She has written an acclaimed instructional manual: Writing Workshop; How to Create a Culture of Useful Feedback that is used in universities and workshops all over the world. Francesca lives in Newton, MA with her husband and two children and is currently working on a memoir and a novel.

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